I started reading "Making of Prince of Persia" recently and it is amazingly inspiring because it captures his real thoughts as he was making it, unlike autobiographies where hindsight distorts things, no matter how real the author wants it to be. I second the recommendation.

I really enjoyed the Prince of Persia one. It's relatively lacking (though not totally) in terms of the coding side of things but there's a really good story and sense of what it took to push a complete game out of the door at the time.

Do they look good on Kindle, or is the physical book vastly better?

Wow! they jumped to the top reading list.

The C64 reverse engineering covers that a bit. At least regarding general data structures, as opposed to in-depth Apple II hackery (you get some C64 hackery instead, of course).

http://popc64.blogspot.com

Carmack's famous games were not developed solo - he developed the breakthrough enabling technology that made the game possible - full-screen sidescrolling on a PC, 3D stuff, etc.

Mechner's games stand out in part because he seems to have done just about everything himself and, especially for the time all the parts are outstanding - the design, the artwork, the 'art direction', the animation, the gameplay. And then he went off and churned them out in 6502 assembly.

Another World by Eric Chahi, also reviewed by Sanglard [1] is a great example too. I love how he made all the game engine fits in only 20 KB, with the bulk of the game written in opcodes, interpreted by a VM. That made it very easy to port the game to any platform since there was only 20 KB to convert.

[1] http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php

Very early 80's maybe, but even a couple of years in most popular games had teams working on them, though not very large ones.

A lot of musicians doing game-music for the Commodore 64, for example, were popular enough in their own right that sometimes publishers would hire them knowing their names would be sufficient to guarantee sales for otherwise mediocre titles. Some of them even perform their 80's game music live today, and there's a whole scene doing remixes of the music.

Cool. In the comments from that post, there's another article that traces that inverse square root implementation back even further - almost 20 years back at this point:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

That was interesting! Has he ever said how he came up with the number?

I learned to program 6502 on the BBC Micro. It had a built-in assembler as part of its BASIC. Very useful! Assembly language instructions got written to memory according to the value of a specific variable, and there was a somewhat neat mechanism for doing 2 passes (to fix up forward references). It was quite flexible, and gave you all the power of the inbuilt BASIC - which was of course awful, though excellent by the standards of the day - for writing macros.

More programming languages should have included something like this, I think. Maybe by now we'd have runtime code generation as a common primitive, something like LuaJIT's dynasm (http://luajit.org/dynasm.html), only with GC, so you could generate custom little routines at runtime.

(As it is, what do we get? gcc-style inline assembly language. Progress? My arse.)

The PC version had color. It was my first version as well, and to me is the definitive port. I didn't like the cartoony Macintosh version that became the standard for all the 16 bit ports. The new art muted the fluid animations IMO.